I can’t remember the last time I made a post on here that wasn’t a weekly rankings post or end of year Top 12 list… Hopefully this won’t be the last, but as ever I make no promises, since I’ll only end up breaking them!

So I was given the Dragon’s Loyalty Award by Medieval Otaku over a month ago, and while I won’t be nominating anyone else for it since I’m not a big fan of chain letters and the like, I still greatly appreciate the gesture, so will be fulfilling the ‘share 7 things other bloggers may not know about you’ part of the award. 🙂

This Summer season may end up being a good one for dragons in anime, what with all the fantasy shows!

AngryJellyfish is back! And by that I mean my internet speeds have returned to usable levels, faster than ever now that we’ve changed providers! Finally I can actually enjoy my days off from work, catch up with the current anime season, and write all those blog posts I’ve been promising since the summer, as well as all the end of year posts I always do in December. 😀 But for now, just an update.

I’ll be away on a training course at Bangor University from later this afternoon until Thursday. It’ll be covering things that will supposedly increase my chances of finding employment – stuff like interview skills, CV pimping and finding my ‘unique selling point’ (apparently my awesome hair doesn’t count). This is the second time I’ve attended a graduate course there; the first was in 2010, a couple of weeks before I decided to start this blog actually. I found it informative, but decided to do an MSc instead of continuing to look for work, so most of what I learned last time has been replaced with info about wind farms. Hopefully this’ll refresh my memory, teach me new things, and finally lead to a job. If nothing else, it comes with 4* accommodation and free meals, which will be heavenly after two weeks without central heating!

I’ve been reading a lot more of other people’s blogs recently, mostly to seek out other ACAA lists and compare them to my own, but I plan to keep following those that strike me as well written, interesting, or just different. And I have to say there are a lot of differences between all the blogs I’ve seen. But one thing that almost all of them have in common is the presence of a separate page with a little background info on the blogger themselves.

It’s been over a fortnight since I last posted anything, and it wasn’t due to a lack of things happening. Instead, I found myself with considerably less free time, and anime will always be my main priority. The main cause of this is my A4E course finally kicking off, meaning I’m doing 5 days of volunteering, regardless of the weather. Only 5 hours a day (breaks included in that), but when you factor in the travel it’s more like 6. And it’s during the daytime when the internet is fastest, with early starts that stop me making the most of late night speeds as well. LAME.

Not that the conscription (I’ll be calling it that from now on since it’s no longer voluntary) itself is bad at all, I just wish it didn’t impact on my free time so much. Gardening is still fun, and my introduction to Barnardos charity shop on Monday proved to be just as good. Tasks included steaming, tagging and hanging clothing, fixing a couple of minor problems on their computer, helping to bag + load the recycling onto a van, and sorting out books. This latter job was the most difficult for me, as their definition of ‘good condition’ was very different to mine. Yellowed pages are only to be expected from books from the 1960’s, and wouldn’t put me off buying them if they were of interest to me, but apparently they’re not good enough. And books that aren’t good enough get recycled. Might as well light up the bonfire… But anyway, the people working there are nice, and there’s so many different things that need doing that I’d never get bored. I’ve got more to do on the computers when I go back tomorrow, and they plan on putting me on the till eventually too!

So that’s my new excuse for inactivity! Hopefully once I’m used to this routine I’ll get better at managing my time in the evenings and on weekends.

Thanks to everyone who voted in my poll, it is now closed. And has been for a few days, but I couldn’t be bothered posting. As you could see if you scrolled down a bit, Marimite won over Junjou, barely. And I finished getting hold of it earlier. Chances are I’ll come back to the latter series in the future though, if only for the lulz.

Aberystwyth anime society is having their annual barbecue in just over a week (weather dependent), so hopefully that will give me something to post about.

In my last post I said I’d be going back for more volunteering the next day(Thursday). That didn’t happen, because the head gardener was called away for a meeting at the last minute. I also didn’t go the day after, because my dad was off work and I had nobody to give me a lift. Apparently he’s off most Fridays at the moment, something that he didn’t mention when I specifically asked if volunteering on Fridays was convenient… bah. I have Mondays off because I only wanted to volunteer three days a week (and Wednesday is job centre day); and I can’t go in on Tuesday either because I have a job interview. Meh, at least that will be productive. 😛 When I go back on Thursday I’ll probably ask to shift my day off from Monday to Friday, because at this rate I’m not going to get enough experience to make it worthwhile.

So for the past five days I’ve been living virtually the same lazy lifestyle I was before (pokemon, anime and ridiculous sleeping patterns), though I have just started adding characters to Anime-Planet’s new character database. So at least I’ve been of use to someone, even if it’s too obscure to put on a CV. 🙂 Another good thing is that my aches and pains have gone away, so I’ll be in better condition to work this Thursday than I would have been the week before. And with the job interview tomorrow + job centre the day after, I have plenty of time to get used to the early starts too.

This has been a slow week for anime releases though, made slower still by my awful internet speeds. A lot of sub groups I’m following seem to be disbanding/dropping series too, which is a shame for us fans but they all have their good reasons. Not sure what I’m going to do about Seikon no Qwaser though, nobody is subbing the censored massacred TV rips, while the uncensored webstream’s video quality is too poor for a videophile like me. Plus I’m a bit scared to find out what exactly’s going on behind the censorship – honestly, I watch this series for the plot!

Because of the slow releases, I put most of my time towards Pokemon. Just caught the three Regi pokemon on Emerald yesterday, and used them to get Regigigas this morning. Now, if only I had Caterpie…